Developing Narrative Competence Through Reading and Writing Metafictive Texts

The classroom-based research discussed in this article focuses on how elementary students' experiences with a collection of postmodern picturebooks developed their narrative competence. This article explores how 39 Grades 3 and 4 students' written and visual texts were affected by reading a particular selection of picturebooks. The students wrote responses about the literature, discussed the focus picturebooks with peers, received explicit instruction about metafictive devices, and created their own print multimodal texts. As well as presenting the overall findings of the content analysis of the children's books, the written and visual texts of two children is discussed in depth to show how the children were able to identify, understand and create narratives that were sophisticated, complex, and metafictive in nature.